Jack Cole of the LENR-Cold Fusion website is continuing his experimentation with a relatively low power LENR experimental setup, and a new experiment shows results that seem to demonstrate excess heat from his system.

Jack has done previous experimentation which showed promising results which used lithium hydroxide as the hydrogen source; in this test he added titanium hydride at a suggestion of Jones Beene on vortex-l with the hope of getting more consistent hydrogen production. His reactor fuel was “mostly nickel powder (INCO type 255, 2.2 to 2.5 um), lithium hydroxide (LiOH), iron oxide-red (Fe2O3), titanium hydride (TiH2), and a small amount of lime based ceramic mix”. Calorimetry was done by using a thermocouple system described in the comments to this article.

Here is a chart showing the results of the experimental vs. the calibration run.

Jack is careful not to claim he has proof of excess heat here — he considers that he must reach a COP of 1.5 before he can assume that there is a true indication of excess heat due to LENR. But it’s good to see him continue to experiment and share his results, and I hope he continues his very interesting work.

UPDATE: Jack has provided an update in which he concludes that no excess heat was generated in this system. He writes:

Unfortunately, the re-calibration revealed a higher curve than the first yielding a max excess power of 4.2W. We can probably safely discard this as being excess heat. There have been a number of valid points raised in the comments on things to consider as far as systematic sources of error are concerned. One concern was about the validity of the calibration run. One hypothesis I had was about the calibration run tube possibly being in contact with the insulation at the bottom, whereas the experimental tube was not touching the insulation beneath (suspended by the electrical leads). The thought was that contact with this insulation would allow heat to be conducted downward into the ceramic element and supporting ceramic bricks. The original calibration cell was re-inserted and care was taken to place it as close as possible to the same position as the experimental tube (slightly suspended by the electrical leads above the lower insulation). Of possible interest is that the temperatures of the reaction cell were grossly consistent with each other, whereas the experimental tube was ~60C hotter. Again, this is of uncertain significance and probably not a reliable indication of excess heating. I apologize for raising false hope with this experiment, and appreciate the feedback and help in discovering that it was not excess heating.

No need to apologize, Jack — you have been upfront all the time about the possibility uncertain results. This is all valuable data you are sharing with everyone. Many thanks to you!

One of the problems with using alumina as a Ni/H structural material is it ability to remove elements from the fuel mix. Alumina absorbs elements at temperatures between 900C on up beyond 1000C

If we add a chemical reaction retardant to slow down the lithium aluminium hydride reaction time, alumina might remove that retardant before that reaction retardant has had a chance to do its job.

We might be better off using silicon carbide as the tube material. SiC has proven itself in being inactive as an element barrier at high temperatures in pebble bed nuclear reactor fuels.

Another possibility is zirconium and/or its oxide that is also used in nuclear fuel rods.

Robert Ellefson

Wonderful news, Jack! Negative results are every bit as important as positive results, and I really appreciate your sharing of your progress openly, and accepting of community feedback in such an integral manner. This is real open science done properly, the way of the future, IMHO. Sharing lessons learned from “failures” is critical for progress in this field, and I hope it becomes standard practice. Keep up the great work, Jack!

http://lenr-coldfusion.com/ Jack Cole

Thank you Robert. I agree that this is the way of the future in science. The peer review process with followers of LENR actually works quite well! There are talented people from so many different fields and perspectives, and I have learned a lot from them.

As many readers pointed out, there was a error in calibration. The new calibration barely shows any excess.

Andreas Moraitis

Anyway an important lesson, which will lead to more reliable results in the future. All in all, rather a progress than a setback.

http://www.lenrnews.eu/lenr-summary-for-policy-makers/ AlainCo

yas that seems too similar with the calibration.
one hypothesis is that the TC moved between the two tests…
more work to do.
this show the interest of Parkhomov method.

http://lenr-coldfusion.com/ Jack Cole

I appreciate all the comments and thoughts about figuring out if this is real or an error. It could certainly be an error. I’m running another calibration run to see if that helps to clarify. If nothing else, the methods are being refined and hopefully we can achieve something that can be easily repeated eventually.

Omega Z

Jack,
Keep up the good work.

Comments & Negative criticisms can be the hardest thing to deal with in any field of work. Just know that most of the people here at ECW wish you well & use their comments constructively in your work.
Work Safe. OZ

http://lenr-coldfusion.com/ Jack Cole

I don’t mind negative criticisms. That is one reason I posted the results to get suggestions for things to try and help to figure out if it’s real or the methods need to be refined. Thank you for the encouragement OZ & Frank!

Jack, I don’t know if I am suggesting too much, but perhaps you could run a control run, then a real run, then a control run, and so on up to 10 times. Plot the results, and then perhaps we can see if there is a pattern.

http://lenr-coldfusion.com/ Jack Cole

That doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. It would give a much better characterization of the noise floor. I have some changes to make to improve the apparatus further. I have some equipment and parts ordered for improvements in addition to tubes and compression fittings to make 10 reaction cells.

Curbina

Certainly seems interesting, what I wonder is why the excess heat appears throughout all the power imputs, I hope he can sort out if its not a measurement error.

pg

mmhh, 16% does not sound like a very solid result.

Ophelia Rump

How do you determine from looking at this if the calibration accounted for 100% of the electricity becoming heat?

Nicholas Chandler-Yates

The odd thing is that the Excess heat is constant (as a percentage of total heat) on top of the calibration run. This indicates to me that his calibration is off, rather than real excess heat. in a LENR experiment you would expect the heat to show up when you reached a certain threshold, not to be present all the way through.

Andreas Moraitis

Hmm… I wonder if the powder could significantly influence the internal heat transmission. Perhaps an additional calibration run with a ‘neutral’ fuel mixture should be carried out.

Ophelia Rump

Since there is only one calibration run we have no idea of the margin of error, unless we account for the known value of heat which should be generated by the electricity at 100% conversion. For each and every test we should both know the margin of error in the test procedure and the precise error for the calibration run. Then you could know in one test if you had anomalous heat. Otherwise this is barking at the moon.

Mike Henderson

Imagine a fuel pellet, the size and shape of a large capsule of medicine like these:

The shell of each pellet is an inexpensive high temperature glass or ceramic material like Vycor or fused silica or alumina. Inside each pellet is a fraction of an ounce of commodity Nickel and metal hydride powders.

These pellets can be easily loaded into a carousel to be rotated into the chamber of a furnace. That furnace drives a tiny turbine or sterling engine attached to a generator. A pellet or two yield enough electrical energy to power a home and car for a month. Spent pellets contain inert and safe materials; in quantity, they can be easily recycled as ingredients for steel or other alloys. No ash, no radiation, no CO2.

The future is awesome.

Timar

Keep away from children! When ingested they might cause a runaway reaction 😉

bachcole

Still well within the margin of measurement or other experimental error, but looking much better.

Zeddicus Zul Zorander

Very interesting, especially hearing that titanium hydrite was used. I think I read somewhere that it may possibly give more excess heat, but increased radiation could be a factor too. Seeing the temperatures and pressures in these type of tests go up, possible output energiea rising and the MFMP reactor explode, it’s clear that we are entering a dangerous phase of LENR experiments. As I said before, we live in interesting times…

Andreas Moraitis

Jack says that the experiment produced excess power for 22 hours. Let’s be conservative and assume an average of +8 W. Then the excess heat would come to 634 kJ. One would have to burn about 4.5 g of hydrogen in order to release an equal amount of energy. So, this looks interesting. In addition, the calorimetry seems to be less prone to errors than the “one sensor” method.

catfish

Thanks to Jack Cole for his excellent continuing experiments. It is great to see someone bringing in data on this.